It is the oldest of questions. "What is love! It is a pretty thing, as sweet unto a shepherd as a king," wrote Robert Greene back in the 16th century. Four hundred years on, the poser is as tricky as ever. Ahead of Valentine’s Day, theories still abound as to why two people are attracted to each other. To some, it is a romance-laden "bolt from the blue", a deftly timed arrow from Cupid. To the scientists, it is a mixture of factors: everything from status to age, similarity, and pheromones.
"Explaining pheromones is like trying to find the end of a piece of spaghetti in a big plate of spaghetti bolognese," says Dr Simon Moore, a psychology lecturer at London Metropolitan University. "There are so many areas you have to consider, despite the fact that we came down from the trees to the plains thousands of years ago. Psychologists still think we have these inherited cultural factors that underpin attraction, which are different for males and females." And women, it seems, tend to be more discriminating than men because they are fertile for a shorter part of their lives.
So what is the answer? "If you ask a load of men in a room what they find attractive, it is often eye contact. It produces a physiological response in the opposite sex," says Elizabeth Clark, the author for Flirting for Dummies (to be published in June). "If a lady is staring at you for 10 seconds, it’s because she wants you. Women always get themselves into trouble by doing that. They think they’re being friendly, but men interpret it differently."
March 21, 2009
